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Speaker 1: For more information, check out the show notes. Enjoy the episode.
Speaker 2: The following episode contains references to suicide. If you or
Speaker 2: someone you know is in need of help, please contact
Speaker 2: the Suicide in Crisis Lifeline by dialing nine eight eight.
Speaker 2: Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 1: After father Dave is reassigned, Alana gets even more involved
Speaker 1: with her church, Saint Thom's. As Joyce remembers it, the
Speaker 1: church invites a licensed therapist, a woman named Kate, to
Speaker 1: offer low cost therapy to students. Alana, who's nineteen, eagerly
Speaker 1: signs up.
Speaker 3: When I first met Kate, I was shaking. I was desperate.
Speaker 3: I was nervous. She stared at me blankly, yet attentively.
Speaker 3: I couldn't speak. I'm sorry, I'm so nervous. Don't be sorry.
Speaker 3: I know it's hard. I'm a stranger. But she wasn't
Speaker 3: a stranger. She had the aura of a mother, my mother.
Speaker 3: I wanted her to help catch my tears and collect them,
Speaker 3: keep them tucked away deep into her bosom. I felt
Speaker 3: deep shame. I could barely get the words out I
Speaker 3: struggle with same sex attraction. She asked, if God could
Speaker 3: take away your same sex attraction, would you ask him to?
Speaker 1: From Tenderfoot TV, I'm Simon kent Fong and this is
Speaker 1: Dear Alana, Part four Judo. I moved to New York
Speaker 1: City after college to work at a Catholic media company
Speaker 1: and Internet, a faith based NGO that lobbied at the
Speaker 1: un Looking back, I was such a different person then,
Speaker 1: but in some ways I haven't changed at all. I
Speaker 1: was trying to find work that would help bring the
Speaker 1: world closer to God. But the other reason I headed
Speaker 1: to the Big Apple, the one I didn't say out loud,
Speaker 1: was to find a therapist who could help me with
Speaker 1: my same sex attractions. Unlike Alana, whose therapists kind of
Speaker 1: fell into her lap through Saint Thom's, I had to
Speaker 1: look a little harder. On the note that Father William
Speaker 1: gave me when he told me these people will quote
Speaker 1: fix you. He wrote down the name of a website.
Speaker 1: That website was narth dot com. Which stood for the
Speaker 1: National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. It was
Speaker 1: the leading organization in the nineties and mid odts promoted
Speaker 1: sexual orientation change efforts, what we now call conversion therapy.
Speaker 1: What Father William didn't know was that I'd already been
Speaker 1: to narth's website a thousand times before, I'd read every page.
Speaker 4: We believe that homosexuality is a symptom of early childhood trauma.
Speaker 4: We get the client to address those traumas and they
Speaker 4: will experience a diminishment in their same sex attraction.
Speaker 1: That's Joseph Nicolosi, one of the founders of NARTH, who
Speaker 1: I'll talk about later. Before I go any further, I
Speaker 1: want to make it clear that all of my experiences
Speaker 1: with this kind of therapy were self initiated. Not even
Speaker 1: my parents pressured me to do it. And while obviously
Speaker 1: I was influenced by my church, by the time Father
Speaker 1: William told me to get help, I'd already gone through
Speaker 1: dozens of websites and books on the subject on my own.
Speaker 1: He merely confirmed what I was already determined to do
Speaker 1: to be fixed, because now my vocation depended on it.
Speaker 1: You see, I couldn't be a priest if I kept
Speaker 1: having these tendencies. In two thousand and five, the Vatican
Speaker 1: published its guidelines on seminary admissions. In it, they emphatically
Speaker 1: said that those with deep seated homosexual tendencies should not
Speaker 1: be admitted. Only if you grew out of this quote
Speaker 1: transitory problem. Could you join in practice? Many gay men
Speaker 1: lie and become priests anyways, But I didn't want to cheat.
Speaker 1: I wanted to follow the Vatican guidelines and get over
Speaker 1: this quote transitory problem. How is that going to happen?
Speaker 1: Thankfully there was a solution. Conversion therapy. Conversion therapy refers
Speaker 1: to the controversial practice of trying to change or convert
Speaker 1: one's sexual orientation to go from gata strait or gay
Speaker 1: to less gay. It can look like many different things, psychotherapy, healing, prayer,
Speaker 1: even twelve steps, and it's not always blatantly.
Speaker 4: We're allowing people to be who they want to be.
Speaker 4: We're not imposing, we're not forcing people to change. We're
Speaker 4: just exploring.
Speaker 1: Again, Joseph Nicolosi, using a free will argument to defend
Speaker 1: the practice. When some people hear the term conversion therapy,
Speaker 1: they may think of forced, gruesome practices like electroshock and lobotomies.
Speaker 1: Those practices certainly existed, but conversion therapy today looks a
Speaker 1: lot different, and both Alana and I pursued it to
Speaker 1: follow what we felt was God's will.
Speaker 3: The reason I thought out therapy is because I need
Speaker 3: to get this under control if I want to be
Speaker 3: a nun or a wife.
Speaker 1: Conversion therapy today is also a lot more common than
Speaker 1: you'd think. An estimated seventy thousand youth in the US
Speaker 1: will go through some form of conversion therapy before they
Speaker 1: turn eighteen, And a big reason why it's still happening
Speaker 1: is because, as you'll see for Alana and me, it
Speaker 1: can be compelling to a young person who's desperate to change.
Speaker 1: So it's two thousand and eight and I'm in New
Speaker 1: York City. It's the middle of the Great Recession, and
Speaker 1: I'd just saved up enough money to be able to
Speaker 1: afford to see a therapist for the first time. But
Speaker 1: who could help me? I couldn't just walk into any
Speaker 1: therapist's office. I wanted to be fixed, not encouraged, and
Speaker 1: I knew that most therapists would be affirming of my
Speaker 1: sexual orientation and wouldn't agree to help me change it.
Speaker 1: So I was kind of scared, what if a therapist
Speaker 1: tried to steer me in a direction that went against
Speaker 1: my faith? Luckily I found someone. He was the go
Speaker 1: to Catholic therapist for conservative Catholics in the Tri State area.
Speaker 1: Even Mother Teresa sent her nuns to see him. On
Speaker 1: his website, he explicitly embraced the teachings of the Catholic
Speaker 1: Church and also talked about the work of Narth in
Speaker 1: one of his interviews. So he passed my litmus test.
Speaker 1: I eagerly scheduled an appointment. In our first session, I
Speaker 1: sat across from him in a worn leather armchair in
Speaker 1: his dim Manhattan office. He was heavy set and in
Speaker 1: his mid forties and spoke with a kind of Jersey confidence.
Speaker 1: My palms were sweating. He asked me about my relationship
Speaker 1: with my father. If I'd grown up with a strong
Speaker 1: role model who rough housed with me and told me
Speaker 1: I had what it took to be a man. No,
Speaker 1: I said, my dad was your typical Asian dad, kind
Speaker 1: of distant and strict, non confrontational, always busy with work.
Speaker 1: He nodded. He asked me if I ever felt distant
Speaker 1: around other boys growing up. Yes, I said, I'd been
Speaker 1: bullied and didn't have many friends, boys or girls. He
Speaker 1: asked me about my body and if I felt disconnected
Speaker 1: from it in any way. Well, yeah, there were many
Speaker 1: things I hated about my body. He then asked me
Speaker 1: what I wanted. I don't want to have same sex
Speaker 1: attraction anymore. Is this something you can help me with?
Speaker 5: He nodded.
Speaker 1: The idea of treating homosexuality goes back well over one
Speaker 1: hundred years. The original term homosexual was defined squarely as
Speaker 1: a disease, and this idea that gay people were sick
Speaker 1: in some way dominated the public consciousness well into the sixties.
Speaker 6: What Jimmy didn't know was that Ralph was sick, a
Speaker 6: sickness that was not visible, like smallpox, but no less
Speaker 6: dangerous and contagious, A sickness of the mind. You see,
Speaker 6: Ralph was a homosexual, a person who demands an intimate
Speaker 6: relationship with members of their own sex.
Speaker 1: A dangerous and contagious sickness. With this fear in the air,
Speaker 1: it's no surprise that in nineteen fifty two, the American
Speaker 1: Psychiatrics so Uociation or the APA, listed homosexuality as well
Speaker 1: a mental disorder. And what do you do with a
Speaker 1: mental disorder, a sickness, a disease, you try to cure it.
Speaker 1: So what am I supposed to do now? I'm so
Speaker 1: d are you?
Speaker 7: You start masturbating with your homosexual image there, but at
Speaker 7: that point of inevitability switch over to the female picture.
Speaker 7: I mean, maybe nothing will happen, maybe you won't have
Speaker 7: a climax, but you probably will, and I want.
Speaker 5: To know about it.
Speaker 1: Gay people became guinea pigs. Scientists experimented with everything from
Speaker 1: shock and hormone therapies to testicular transplants, hysterectomies, and institutionalization.
Speaker 1: Behavioral psychologists gave clients nausea inducing drugs while playing audio
Speaker 1: of gay sex. They tried all kinds of things, but
Speaker 1: the biggest influence on conversion therapy came at the turn
Speaker 1: of the century from Sigmund Freud. In short, his theory
Speaker 1: was that our psyches were shaped by our childhoods and
Speaker 1: our parents, and his contemporaries were fascinated by the prospect
Speaker 1: of using his psychoanalytic techniques to uncover how childhood traumas
Speaker 1: and parenting patterns might hold the key to curing this disease.
Speaker 8: I do not believe that it is possible to produce
Speaker 8: a homosexual if the father is a constructive father to
Speaker 8: his son.
Speaker 1: That's Irving Bieber. Together with other New York psychotherapists like
Speaker 1: Charles Sockerati's, he posited that homosexuality was caused by a
Speaker 1: distant father and what he called a close binding mother.
Speaker 1: Here he is in a nineteen sixty eight CBS News documentary.
Speaker 8: Doctor Charles Soccerreats is a New York psychoanalyst a clinical
Speaker 8: assistant professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine. Here,
Speaker 8: lecturing to a group of resident psychiatrists on homosexuality.
Speaker 6: I was wondering if you think that there any quotes
Speaker 6: happy homosexuals. The fact that somebody is homosexual automatically rules
Speaker 6: out the possibility that he will remain happy for long.
Speaker 1: In my opinion, the belief that homosexuality was a kind
Speaker 1: of illness, compulsion, or parenting disaster dominated the public.
Speaker 8: Most Americans are repelled by the mere notion of homosexuality.
Speaker 8: The CBS News survey shows that two out of three
Speaker 8: Americans look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort, or fear. One
Speaker 8: out of ten says hatred. A vast majority believe that
Speaker 8: homosexuality is an illness, and this.
Speaker 1: View had a real impact on society. If you were
Speaker 1: found out to be gay, you'd be fired from your job,
Speaker 1: face interrogation and jail time, and denied entry into the
Speaker 1: United States.
Speaker 8: The dilemma of the homosexual by the law, that is,
Speaker 8: a criminal, shunned by employers, rejected by heterosexual society, a
Speaker 8: displaced person.
Speaker 1: The cracks were beginning to form. By the late forties.
Speaker 1: Research showed that homosexuality was far more common than previously thought,
Speaker 1: and as the gay rights movement began to take off
Speaker 1: alongside the growing consciousness of gay people in society, the
Speaker 1: APA eventually removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders,
Speaker 1: first partially in nineteen seventy four and then completely in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty seven, a few years after I was born.
Speaker 1: For a deeper dive into the fascinating string of events
Speaker 1: that led to this landmark decision, I recommend the documentary Cured,
Speaker 1: as well as the episode titled eighty one Words from
Speaker 1: This American Life. But conversion therapy wasn't just going to
Speaker 1: go away soon. A new wave of conversion therapy research
Speaker 1: and practice would begin a wave that would eventually come
Speaker 1: for me. Alana's journals inspired me to dig up my
Speaker 1: own notebooks. I'm looking at my notes from my therapy sessions.
Speaker 1: I remember being such an A plus student that I
Speaker 1: transcribed every session, sometimes sitting in the stairwell after my
Speaker 1: appointment to write it all down so that I could
Speaker 1: study it later. I begin my notebook with a prayer,
Speaker 1: Dear Lord, this is my new workbook to work on
Speaker 1: my SSA and the healing and recovery of my underlying issues.
Speaker 1: SSA same sex attraction. It sounds very clinical, but that's
Speaker 1: the point. For many Catholics and conservative Christians, same sex
Speaker 1: attraction is the preferred word for homosexuality because other words
Speaker 1: like gay are seen as reductive political labels used by
Speaker 1: radical activists to hijack our identities. Instead, same sex attraction
Speaker 1: describes a condition like psoriasis or depression, something a person
Speaker 1: struggles with but doesn't fully identify as. When I first
Speaker 1: heard the term SSA, I remember feeling relieved. These attractions
Speaker 1: I was starting to have towards the same sex didn't
Speaker 1: mean I was gay like those people on the news
Speaker 1: who were underwear dancing at the Prime.
Speaker 5: I parayed.
Speaker 1: Those people scared me. I wasn't gay like them, but
Speaker 1: struggling with same sex attraction that fit better. A lot
Speaker 1: of my early notes document my therapist's thoughts on the
Speaker 1: importance of developmental milestones. Every boy needs to go through
Speaker 1: certain stages when he's young, first looking up to a
Speaker 1: strong and loving father and being told by that father
Speaker 1: that he has what it takes to be a boy,
Speaker 1: to be a friend, to play sports, etc. Then to fight,
Speaker 1: to train, to test, to lead, then beauty and attraction
Speaker 1: eventually to a woman, and lastly to be a wise
Speaker 1: counselor what steps you missed out on you can't skip.
Speaker 1: We must go back and experience those things. And my
Speaker 1: relationship with my father played a central role in our sessions.
Speaker 1: He asked me to think about the father I I
Speaker 1: wished I had as a boy, that little boy inside
Speaker 1: of me who longs for his dad. He's still there. Together,
Speaker 1: my therapist and I will go and find that boy
Speaker 1: and heal him. There was a lot I wished was
Speaker 1: different about my dad. He was gruff and emotionally distant.
Speaker 1: I was sensitive. We butted heads. I criticized him a lot.
Speaker 1: He once locked me in the garage when I wouldn't
Speaker 1: finish my supper. He was always working or sleeping. When
Speaker 1: my therapist asked me if there was a moment growing
Speaker 1: up when I felt the least connected to my dad,
Speaker 1: one memory stuck out. When I was five or six,
Speaker 1: my dad was obsessed with teaching me how to swim.
Speaker 1: We signed up for parent child swim classes at the
Speaker 1: community center, but I didn't want to go. It was cold,
Speaker 1: it was one ore time, The change room smelled and
Speaker 1: I would cry as we drove to the pool. When
Speaker 1: it was time for the class to begin, I freaked out.
Speaker 1: My dad commanded me to get into the water with him,
Speaker 1: but I shook with fear and cried bitterly. I can't,
Speaker 1: I want to go home. The more I cried, the
Speaker 1: angrier he got his eyes burned with fire, and he'd
Speaker 1: pull me into the pool. All I remember as I
Speaker 1: entered the water was this primal fear, the sense that
Speaker 1: I was going to die. I gripped onto my dad,
Speaker 1: who pushed me away so that I could get used
Speaker 1: to floating, but the panic took over, and I don't
Speaker 1: know how long this went on for. When it was
Speaker 1: all over and we were getting changed, my eyes raw
Speaker 1: from tears and chlorine. My dad wouldn't talk to me.
Speaker 1: His silence conveyed both embarrassment and frustration, and I dreaded
Speaker 1: the following week when this would happen all over again.
Speaker 1: You needed him to protect and encourage you, my therapist said,
Speaker 1: but he didn't. This was a father wound, a wound
Speaker 1: we must heal. It felt so good to be able
Speaker 1: to talk about my childhood with some one, and all
Speaker 1: of these ideas for my therapist connecting trauma to my
Speaker 1: sexuality were really compelling to me. They weren't your typical
Speaker 1: pray the gay away approaches, though many people still encounter those,
Speaker 1: nor were they premised on the outdated idea that being
Speaker 1: gay was a choice. Instead, these theories seemed really psychological
Speaker 1: and appeared to map directly to my life. The person
Speaker 1: most responsible for bringing a level of sophistication to conversion
Speaker 1: therapy was this woman named Elizabeth Moberly. In the seventies,
Speaker 1: while all the drama at the apadlisting homosexuality was going on, Moberly,
Speaker 1: a quiet, bookish woman who had just graduated from Oxford,
Speaker 1: decided to do some research on homosexuality. A lot of
Speaker 1: her friends in the theology department were gay and she
Speaker 1: wanted to better understand them. Here she is speaking at
Speaker 1: a nineteen ninety eight conference organized by Fishnet Ministries.
Speaker 9: I believe that homosexuality derives not from genetic or hormonal causes.
Speaker 9: I believe it is linked with difficulties in the early
Speaker 9: relationship with the same sex parents. The parental identification is
Speaker 9: particularly conspicuous in a lesbian relationship. Typically there is a
Speaker 9: search for a mother figure, even if this is unconscious,
Speaker 9: so really the lesbian partnership has the character of a
Speaker 9: mother daughter relationship.
Speaker 1: Moberly cites this unresolved attachment to mom and dad as
Speaker 1: the underlying need that the homosexual is subconsciously trying to
Speaker 1: resolve those unmet love needs. She thinks get transferred to
Speaker 1: a same sex partner that the child will seek out
Speaker 1: later in adulthood. The way my therapist described it to
Speaker 1: me was that at puberty, my need for my dad
Speaker 1: got a writis sized, but she goes further.
Speaker 9: Same sex love is not a deviation from normality, but
Speaker 9: an attempt to resume and continue the normal developmental process.
Speaker 9: It's not an abnormal sexual drive, it's a normal developmental drive.
Speaker 9: A reparative drive, a reparative attempt to make good developmental deficits.
Speaker 1: She theorizes that by finding a same sex lover, the
Speaker 1: homosexual person is subconsciously repairing a deficit in same sex
Speaker 1: love that they never got from their parent, like a
Speaker 1: body trying to heal itself. Her remember being drawn to
Speaker 1: Moberly's reparative theory because she seemed to be suggesting that
Speaker 1: my attractions weren't bad. In fact, Moberly spends a good
Speaker 1: part of her talk scolding religious people for demonizing same
Speaker 1: sex attractions that she says are at their root perfectly valid,
Speaker 1: and then she's as something counterintuitive.
Speaker 9: Same sex love is not the problem, but the solution.
Speaker 9: Not the problem, but the solution. I really do think
Speaker 9: it's essential to get that person into therapy where they
Speaker 9: can get a more intensified and focused experience of same
Speaker 9: sex relating with somebody who is already fulfilled and secure
Speaker 9: in their own same sex heterosexual identity.
Speaker 1: Moberly's belief is that the way to heal the same
Speaker 1: sex love deficit is through same sex connection, the non
Speaker 1: Eurotic kind like when we were kids. By working with
Speaker 1: a straight therapist of the same sex. The homosexual can
Speaker 1: be healed of these mother or father wounds, have their
Speaker 1: childhood needs met, and naturally become straight. At the time,
Speaker 1: this all sounded plausible to me. Her theory seemed to
Speaker 1: explain so much of my childhood. I didn't have a
Speaker 1: great relationship with my dad, and others who since extended
Speaker 1: Moberly's work have brought in the childhood trauma theory to
Speaker 1: include not just the role of parents, but also peers.
Speaker 1: Given that I was bullied for so long on the
Speaker 1: schoolyard that totally checked out too. I never questioned whether
Speaker 1: maybe my experiences were actually quite common for a lot
Speaker 1: of kids. I was just happy to have an explanation
Speaker 1: for my SSA, and by working with my therapist, I
Speaker 1: was determined to heal these wounds and resume my developmental
Speaker 1: journey towards heterosexuality. At the end of Elizabeth Moberly's talk,
Speaker 1: she takes questions from the audience.
Speaker 7: My question is granted that I really believe the whole
Speaker 7: framework and the whole everything you've been telling us. This
Speaker 7: makes such sense psychologically, But I want to know what
Speaker 7: are the bottom line results. How many people can you
Speaker 7: give us? Percentages? Can you give us figures. Can you
Speaker 7: give us some kind of hope? But no matter.
Speaker 9: I can give you a hope, but I can't give
Speaker 9: you a head count.
Speaker 4: Sorry, I'm loving for I love the idea, but I
Speaker 4: need the results.
Speaker 7: You see, I'm screaming for g Bill.
Speaker 9: You go out and use these principles, and you come
Speaker 9: back and you give me your headcount.
Speaker 1: The reason Moberley can't answer this question is because she
Speaker 1: was never a clinical practitioner. She had never tested out
Speaker 1: her reparative theory on actual patients, but others soon would.
Speaker 1: In the late eighties, once homosexuality was no longer officially
Speaker 1: considered a mental disorder, practitioners who'd spent their careers trying
Speaker 1: to treat homosexuality were outraged. They called the APA's decision
Speaker 1: a quote destructive and blind pursuit of political correctness, and
Speaker 1: so Charles Charides, a Catholic, and his colleagues Joseph Nicolosi,
Speaker 1: also Catholic, who you heard at the beginning of this episode,
Speaker 1: and Benjamin Kaufman, who was Jewish. The three of them
Speaker 1: got together and started NARTH, the National Association for Research
Speaker 1: and Therapy of Homosexuality. They published their own research and
Speaker 1: started to bring Moberly's ideas into clinical practice. The establishment
Speaker 1: of NARTH injected new life into the conversion therapy movement.
Speaker 1: Joseph Nicolosi would appear on news shows and Doctor Phil
Speaker 1: Partner with Focus on the Family and advise Catholic and
Speaker 1: Christian ministries on all things gay coming up.
Speaker 4: He claims he's reversed homosexual tendencies and hundreds of his
Speaker 4: patients through therapy. I have the belief that all people
Speaker 4: are heterosexual in their nature, and that the particular trauma
Speaker 4: creates the homosexual condition.
Speaker 1: And they came up with a term that described their techniques.
Speaker 1: They called it reparative therapy. You can see now where
Speaker 1: that comes from. In fact, Elizabeth Moberly would later claim
Speaker 1: that Joseph Nicolosi took credit for her ideas and they
Speaker 1: publicly feuded over it. In the literature from the nineties onwards,
Speaker 1: it was this kind of reparative therapy that captivated many
Speaker 1: religious therapists like mine, eager to combine church teaching with psychology.
Speaker 1: Since I had SSA, I clearly missed out on the
Speaker 1: rights of passage that fathers normally give their sons, the
Speaker 1: sorts of interactions that secured a sense of masculinity, so
Speaker 1: my therapists would be stepping in to play that role.
Speaker 1: He would become a sort of surrogate father to me.
Speaker 1: He said, I'm intelligent, articulate, blessed with many artistic gifts,
Speaker 1: and these are good, but we need to work on
Speaker 1: my masculinity. For the next year, my therapist would teach
Speaker 1: me about how men move their bodies and take up space,
Speaker 1: how men insalt each other. As a way of bonding.
Speaker 1: We practiced what he called verbal judo so that I
Speaker 1: could learn how to spar with words and insult other men.
Speaker 1: We role played situations from my childhood where I was
Speaker 1: bullied and he had me fight back and tell my
Speaker 1: bullies off. It wasn't easy, and honestly it felt a
Speaker 1: little awkward at times, but I took it all very seriously.
Speaker 1: There was no shortcut to growth. Looks like we had
Speaker 1: a few months focused on inner child healing and this
Speaker 1: is a letter I wrote to myself as my inner child.
Speaker 1: Dear big Simon, I want to tell you about a
Speaker 1: big hurt. For the longest time, I felt insecure and
Speaker 1: not confident. Playing red ass at recess. That's a game
Speaker 1: we used to play in elementary school where we'd have
Speaker 1: to throw a tennis ball against a wall, and if
Speaker 1: you missed, you'd get a letter until it's spelt red ass,
Speaker 1: at which point you'd lose and have a ball whipped
Speaker 1: at your ass. I always dreaded throwing the ball from
Speaker 1: far away because I can't throw that. I remember running
Speaker 1: to the wall to not get a letter, and then
Speaker 1: I slipped on a patch of ice and smashed my
Speaker 1: face against the brick wall. My glasses were destroyed and
Speaker 1: I was bleeding for weeks. I had a nasty scab
Speaker 1: on the right side of my face, and the other
Speaker 1: boys teased me even more. I remember feeling so alone
Speaker 1: and sad and so numb. No one cared. I wanted
Speaker 1: to hide at home. I think this was the last
Speaker 1: straw that made me give up on ever fitting in.
Speaker 1: From now on, I just have to figure it out
Speaker 1: by myself. To repair some of these same sex masculinity
Speaker 1: wounds around sports, my therapist encouraged me to take up
Speaker 1: a sport. I chose judo, maybe because of all the
Speaker 1: verbal judo we were practicing, but also because I thought
Speaker 1: it looked cool, so I gave it a shot. I
Speaker 1: showed up at the dojo, and they paired me up
Speaker 1: with some went at my skill level, which for me
Speaker 1: meant the eleven year old boy or the middle aged woman.
Speaker 1: Those were my options. Week after week, I'd get thrown
Speaker 1: on the mat, get up, and get thrown again. It's
Speaker 1: something you have to get used to in judo. One
Speaker 1: time I dislocated my toe. Some days I'd throw up
Speaker 1: from nerves. And the guys there, they were like comically attractive,
Speaker 1: Like why are all the men in judo so good looking?
Speaker 1: So he says, when the attraction comes, don't fight it,
Speaker 1: accept it. There's something behind it. Take a pause, and
Speaker 1: instead of freaking out, ask yourself why. What are the
Speaker 1: hidden immediate thoughts that come to mind? How do I
Speaker 1: feel about myself? What do I believe about this person?
Speaker 1: Do I feel small and weak? Do I think he
Speaker 1: has a better body. My therapist called this the exotic
Speaker 1: becomes erotic theory. Because I was so cut off from
Speaker 1: my masculinity, I saw men as the other and he said,
Speaker 1: contributed to their eroticization since we're naturally attracted to opposites.
Speaker 1: So I had to demystify these men by confronting them platonically,
Speaker 1: especially the ones I felt attracted to. Remember, same sex
Speaker 1: love is the solution, not the problem. There was this
Speaker 1: one guy, Patrick, probably in his thirties, who I felt
Speaker 1: extremely attracted to. This is an entry about Patrick. It
Speaker 1: took a risk, but I started talking with Patrick, asking
Speaker 1: him where he lives. He offered me a ride. I accepted.
Speaker 1: Once we started talking, it broke the ice, and what
Speaker 1: I thought that he thinks I'm a loser just didn't
Speaker 1: seem true. In the car, he said he was into
Speaker 1: computers as a kid, but didn't stay in it and
Speaker 1: regrets it. He doesn't even know how to download pictures.
Speaker 1: He's the leader of his police squad, climbing towers, etc.
Speaker 1: He wants to retire in five years then open a
Speaker 1: bar or a hot dog stand. So now the mystique
Speaker 1: is broken. He's a man trying to live just like me,
Speaker 1: and he seems to like me too. He called me
Speaker 1: brother as I was leaving, Lord, thank you for arranging this.
Speaker 1: I excitedly told my therapist about all of this, and
Speaker 1: he was overjoyed. He said that this guy wouldn't affirm
Speaker 1: me as a brother if he didn't see masculinity in me.
Speaker 1: The therapy was working with time. I believed my attractions
Speaker 1: would go away. September eighteenth, two thousand and eight, I
Speaker 1: asked my therapist how am I progressing. He said, you
Speaker 1: have a high probability to change between one and five years.
Speaker 1: Your ssay is a symptom of a deeper problem. You
Speaker 1: are a heterosexual man with a homosexual problem. He told
Speaker 1: the story of one of his clients who began therapy
Speaker 1: five years ago. Today he's dating. The idea of dating
Speaker 1: women made me light headed and kind of nauseous. I'd
Speaker 1: asked women out before earlier in college, when I was
Speaker 1: trying to see if maybe I could make it work.
Speaker 1: Usually we started out as friends, but whenever we'd get
Speaker 1: too close or I felt like she was falling for me,
Speaker 1: I'd back out. At the time, in the Catholic circles
Speaker 1: I ran in, this was seen as virtuous behavior, a
Speaker 1: sign of sexual purity. Restraint was holy. All that would
Speaker 1: be required for me to change within one to five
Speaker 1: years would be to grow into my masculinity. So I
Speaker 1: returned every week, hopeful that my day of healing would come.
Speaker 3: Kate said that my thoughts and attractions were not bad,
Speaker 3: but if I acted on them, my soul would start
Speaker 3: to wither away. They said I was making too big
Speaker 3: a deal out of it, that it wasn't my true identity.
Speaker 3: It was only a small part of me. It was
Speaker 3: just a disorder. I was so confused.
Speaker 1: I'm with Joyce flipping through Alana's journals. It's uncanny how
Speaker 1: Alana is reiterating the same conversion therapy talking points that
Speaker 1: I got from my therapist. I ask Joyce if she
Speaker 1: knew about Alana's therapist, Kate, and what was going on.
Speaker 8: I remember I went to I met Kate.
Speaker 10: I went to the student center where all these kids
Speaker 10: would meet with Kate and sign up and they paid
Speaker 10: very short amount, but they paid.
Speaker 5: You know you did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's Catholic therapist. Went to Institute for Psychological Sciences,
Speaker 1: which is this Catholic psychology program that is run by
Speaker 1: it started by a religious supporter. About the Legionarias of.
Speaker 5: Christ and their anti ka I mean, they're.
Speaker 1: They're part of this like cluster of many different institutions
Speaker 1: and organizations that are faithful to the teachings of the Church.
Speaker 5: Right, So.
Speaker 1: Yeah, their training and their how they are told to
Speaker 1: counsel people will be within those frameworks. It's hard for
Speaker 1: me to answer her with a definitive yes. Here because
Speaker 1: the Catholic Church doesn't see itself as anti gay people.
Speaker 1: It sees itself as anti gay sex, which it considers
Speaker 1: an elective choice, a sin, something separate from the person.
Speaker 1: Hate the sin, not the sinner. This is why so
Speaker 1: much of the guidance I got in the church was
Speaker 1: framed as protecting me from going to Hell, in the
Speaker 1: same way that a parent would see denying their child
Speaker 1: candy for breakfast as the most loving thing to do.
Speaker 1: But as I see the confusion that this kind of
Speaker 1: council had on Alana, I begin to wonder if maybe
Speaker 1: she was right to feel like this didn't add up,
Speaker 1: that compartmentalizing our sexuality in this way might be what's
Speaker 1: actually wrong. When Joyce first met Alana's therapist, Kate, she
Speaker 1: remembers Kate reiterating that as a therapist, she stands by
Speaker 1: every teaching of the Catholic Church. But Joyce clearly had
Speaker 1: no idea what that implied and didn't know about the
Speaker 1: messages Alana was getting in therapy. When I was looking
Speaker 1: for a therapist, I knew that faithful to the teachings
Speaker 1: of the Catholic Church was code for a conservative therapist
Speaker 1: who would support my efforts to change my sexuality. It
Speaker 1: was a dog whistle that signaled that they'd likely be
Speaker 1: open to conversion therapy theories. In the summer of twenty ten,
Speaker 1: I went home to visit my family. We did the
Speaker 1: usual family barbecues with my grandma and cousins. My younger cousin, Vivian,
Speaker 1: was home from college for the summer, and we took
Speaker 1: a car ride just me and her to pick something
Speaker 1: up from the store. We were always close and joked around.
Speaker 1: She was the comedian of the family, but that day
Speaker 1: in the car, she was unusually quiet and kind of sullen.
Speaker 1: I looked over from the steering wheel and asked her,
Speaker 1: what was up. Nothing, She said, come on, tell me
Speaker 1: what's going on. We pulled into the driveway, and that's
Speaker 1: when something happened that I was not expecting. She came
Speaker 1: out to me. I stopped in my tracks. Although her
Speaker 1: news wasn't a huge surprise to me, I knew I
Speaker 1: needed to say something, but how I had the opportunity
Speaker 1: to be vulnerable with her in that moment, to share
Speaker 1: with her my own struggle, but I was too ashamed
Speaker 1: to admit it. I had worked so hard to get
Speaker 1: to where I was with my therapy. I was so
Speaker 1: close to being fixed that the thought of me opening
Speaker 1: up to her and coming out was not on the table.
Speaker 1: I chose my words carefully. Vivian, you do know that
Speaker 1: you don't have to be gay, right She looked at
Speaker 1: me and tears began to fall down her cheeks. Vivian,
Speaker 1: there are resources out there. From what I've read, homosexuality
Speaker 1: is a developmental delay caused by some sort of childhood trauma.
Speaker 1: You don't have to go down the route that the
Speaker 1: gay activists want you to go down. There are other
Speaker 1: options like therapy. Vivian turned to look out the window.
Speaker 1: She wiped her face, and then she said something I'll
Speaker 1: never forget. You will never understand what it's like to
Speaker 1: be me. You can go get married and have kids
Speaker 1: and live your normal life, but I can never have that,
Speaker 1: and you'll never know what that's like. She got out
Speaker 1: of the car and slammed the door. Everything I'd been
Speaker 1: working on with my therapy culminated in him suggesting one
Speaker 1: day that I bring my dad in for a joint session.
Speaker 1: My parents have always been supportive of me when I
Speaker 1: first came out to them. I brought them to a
Speaker 1: weekend conference organized by Exodus International, the largest Christian umbrella
Speaker 1: network for conversion therapy. We attended lectures and purchased all
Speaker 1: the books at the book table. So when I told
Speaker 1: my dad that this special session with my therapist could
Speaker 1: be a major breakthrough for my healing, the key that
Speaker 1: unlocked everything, he booked a plane ticket right away. I
Speaker 1: felt nervous and excited. This was my chance to heal
Speaker 1: my father wounds and get one step closer towards my goal.
Speaker 1: On the day of our appointment, we walked up to
Speaker 1: the building together, pushed the heavy metal doors, and went inside. Okay,
Speaker 1: mister Fung, thank you for coming, my therapist said, So,
Speaker 1: I'd like for Simon to start off by expressing how
Speaker 1: he feels about your relationship when he was a child.
Speaker 1: I was prepared. My therapist and I had worked for
Speaker 1: weeks on my father wounds. So I told my dad
Speaker 1: what was on my mind. How he never supported me
Speaker 1: in the ways I needed when I was bullied at school,
Speaker 1: how abandoned i'd felt in the swimming pool, how I
Speaker 1: often felt caught in the middle when he and mom
Speaker 1: would fight. It was hard and several times I saw
Speaker 1: my dad WinCE. Then my therapist invited him to respond.
Speaker 1: My dad had his head down and was thoughtful for
Speaker 1: a few seconds, and then he spoke in a way
Speaker 1: I'd never heard before. He was precise and direct and gentle.
Speaker 1: He said that he knows that he did so many
Speaker 1: things wrong, that there were more mistakes that I hadn't mentioned.
Speaker 1: He said he felt so sorry and so bad and
Speaker 1: had no excuses for any of the pain I went through.
Speaker 1: He said he was working on all of this, working
Speaker 1: on himself.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 1: I looked at my therapist to facilitate the rest of
Speaker 1: the conversation. Was there more to dig up? Maybe I
Speaker 1: could do a verbal judo match with my dad or
Speaker 1: have my inner child speak to him. But my therapist
Speaker 1: had his jaw open, and when he turned to me,
Speaker 1: he said, Wow, I'm floored. In all my years of counseling,
Speaker 1: I've never seen such humility, honesty, and courage. He said
Speaker 1: he could only pray for some of these qualities in himself.
Speaker 1: He said, I had an amazing dad. We ended that
Speaker 1: session and my therapist said that further father son appointments
Speaker 1: wouldn't be necessary. As I sent my dad off to
Speaker 1: catch his flight. I was grateful for his honesty and remorse,
Speaker 1: but I was also kind of disappointed. I thought that
Speaker 1: there would be more to our sessions, that there would
Speaker 1: be more to process about our relationship. After what I'd
Speaker 1: hoped would be a breakthrough, I didn't feel any different,
Speaker 1: but a cure still had to be possible. If this
Speaker 1: didn't work, what was I going to do? How would
Speaker 1: I follow god vocation for me? How would I cope?
Speaker 1: I was determined to be a conversion therapy success story,
Speaker 1: to not be gay, to be fixed, and over the
Speaker 1: next five years, I would seek out even more kinds
Speaker 1: of conversion therapy, from a camp in central Virginia where
Speaker 1: we re enacted scenes from my schoolyard in order to
Speaker 1: help me process my childhood bullying, to group therapy where
Speaker 1: we deconstructed our sexual fantasies. There wasn't anything I wasn't
Speaker 1: willing to try in order to find that silver bullet.
Speaker 1: Alana was also willing to try anything. From her records,
Speaker 1: we know that she belonged to a Catholic support group
Speaker 1: for people with SSA. I remember hearing about this group
Speaker 1: growing up. They'd meet regularly in church basements and Somehow
Speaker 1: the timing never worked out for me to go to
Speaker 1: their meetings, which were structured around treating homosexuality as an addiction,
Speaker 1: another popular theory. As the stigma around homosexuality began to
Speaker 1: fade after the APA's decision, Catholic psychologists started professional groups
Speaker 1: like NARTH, and Catholic clergy started ministries. Father John Harvey,
Speaker 1: a moral theyologian who was teaching in DC at the time,
Speaker 1: founded what would become the largest and only Vatican approved
Speaker 1: Catholic ministry for the same sex attracted, a ministry known
Speaker 1: as Courage International.
Speaker 11: It's an organization for the purpose of helping people those
Speaker 11: same sex attractions to lead chase lives. And we use
Speaker 11: these tall steps of AA with permission of them. So
Speaker 11: it's the same kind of program as the dynamics is
Speaker 11: the same.
Speaker 1: On the Saint Thom's community bookshelf, the two books about
Speaker 1: homosexuality are by Father John Harvey. In his interviews, Father
Speaker 1: Harvey insists that his group Courage is not therapy, it's
Speaker 1: a ministry. It's the Church ministering to the individual. But
Speaker 1: the more I listened to him talk about his books,
Speaker 1: like in this interview a year before his death on
Speaker 1: the EWTN Bookmark talk show. The more I'm not so sure.
Speaker 11: That wonderful chatter on one of the greatest psychologists in
Speaker 11: this subject. Her name is Elizabeth Moberly. He's been quoted
Speaker 11: all over the place by Protestants, Catholic Jews. So I
Speaker 11: got hold of that and I the even visited her
Speaker 11: over in England. She knew every word I put down,
Speaker 11: and every word here is her words. You know, I'm
Speaker 11: just summarizing her thinking.
Speaker 1: His books contain Moberly's theories essentially verbatim. He rhymes off
Speaker 1: her theories.
Speaker 11: Relationships for parents, teenage, relationships with peers, you know, an
Speaker 11: overweening mother. These are all very important factors.
Speaker 1: The host asks him whether people can truly be cured
Speaker 1: from same sex attraction?
Speaker 11: Well, must they live with it for the rest of
Speaker 11: their lives?
Speaker 7: And what about we've heard about this, I think Nickelosi
Speaker 7: usually with reparative therapy.
Speaker 11: Reparative therapy is a good thing. It really flows out
Speaker 11: the teaching of Elizabeth Moberley. That's the idea that if
Speaker 11: something's wrong, you can repair it, and what it was
Speaker 11: wrong is an attachment to the sex of same sex attraction.
Speaker 11: You can work your way out of it.
Speaker 1: You know, I can work my way out of this.
Speaker 1: I told myself I had to. How else would I
Speaker 1: become a priest. That guy's not hot. He's just a
Speaker 1: reflection of my underdeveloped masculinity. And it's just a temptation anyways,
Speaker 1: something I can learn to disassociate from. Or is it
Speaker 1: more like a disease or maybe an addiction like gambling
Speaker 1: or alcohol. I was holding all of this in at once,
Speaker 1: and I think Alana must have felt this way too
Speaker 1: sophomore year.
Speaker 3: The reason I thought out therapy is because I need
Speaker 3: to get this under control. If I want to be
Speaker 3: a nun or a wife, a lesbian relationship is not
Speaker 3: an option for me.
Speaker 1: On September twenty ninth, twenty sixteen, right as Alana starting
Speaker 1: her senior year year of college, a police car shows
Speaker 1: up at the chenhouse. Alana's upstairs and Sophia, her younger sister,
Speaker 1: here's the door.
Speaker 12: I answered the door. I see a cop, Alana's friend
Speaker 12: at the time, and a nun, and I was like,
Speaker 12: what is going on?
Speaker 13: And they were like, we're really worried about your sister.
Speaker 10: We need you to go get her right now. And
Speaker 10: I was like, what could possibly be going on. I
Speaker 10: was like, this is such a random group of people.
Speaker 10: I had no idea. I was like, this is so weird.
Speaker 1: She goes upstairs to get Alana.
Speaker 13: Her eyes are so red and I'm clearly crying, and
Speaker 13: I brought her down and I was like, they're like,
Speaker 13: we need to take you to the hospital now.
Speaker 10: She kept saying over and over, She's like, I don't
Speaker 10: want to leave you.
Speaker 1: I don't want to leave you. Just hours before this,
Speaker 1: Alana had told her friend some disturbing news. She had
Speaker 1: planned to kill her herself in the adoration chapel at
Speaker 1: Saint Thom's. The police rush her immediately to the hospital.
Speaker 5: I will follow you, follow you wherever you might go.
Speaker 1: Next time on Dear Alana, it was like a.
Speaker 5: Big deal at the channel House that she was going
Speaker 5: on the state and he picked her up and like
Speaker 5: we had all met him.
Speaker 12: He's super nice, he's handsome.
Speaker 1: How Alana's college community deepens her convictions.
Speaker 5: I will follow you ever since you touched my hand.
Speaker 1: Dear Alana was created, hosted, and written by me Simon
Speaker 1: Kentfong and is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association
Speaker 1: with a Slept Audio and the Center for Independent Documentary.
Speaker 1: It was produced by Laurie Puliski, who also composed the music.
Speaker 1: Executive producers are myself, Donald Albright, and Payne Lindsay. Our
Speaker 1: supervising producer is Tracy leeds Kaplan. Additional music by Makeup
Speaker 1: and Vanity Set sales and distribution by iHeartMedia. Our voice
Speaker 1: actor is Alana Rabor and our credit song I Will
Speaker 1: Follow You is Bye to Loose. Show notes and resources
Speaker 1: can be found on our website Dearlana dot com. If
Speaker 1: you enjoyed this episode, please take time to follow the show,
Speaker 1: rate and review various.
Speaker 5: Notion toud Monton So High, Keep Me Away, Away.
Speaker 12: From the Long.
Speaker 1: Dear Alana is an eight part series released weekly. If
Speaker 1: you can't wait until next week, subscribe to tenderfoot Plus
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